The radio now appears as a device in both audio lists — 'Radio (TCI
network audio)' — so the receive audio and the voice keyer can both take
the CAT link instead of a sound card. No virtual cable, no second card, no
Windows mixer between the recording and the air.
The transmit side reuses the exchange the tone probe established, with a
WAV in place of the sine: the radio asks, we answer with the next slice,
and it sets the pace. The message is converted once, up front, rather than
per frame — a voice message is a few hundred kilobytes, and resampling
inside a callback that has 21 ms to answer would put arithmetic on the
path where a late frame is a gap on the air.
The PTT is untouched by all this: the keyer keys before and unkeys after
exactly as it does with a sound card, so a transmission is bracketed by
the same code whichever way the audio travels. And the playback runs OFF
the CAT goroutine, since everything else about the rig goes through that
one place and a ten-second message would otherwise freeze the frequency
display and the antenna following for ten seconds.
Two refusals rather than silent failure. A radio that has gone away stops
being offered as a device at all, and a radio whose transmit audio source
is still the microphone is caught within a fifth of a second — a voice
keyer that transmits silence is worse than one that says why it will not.
Padlocks. LockBtn was declared INSIDE the App component, so every render gave
React a new component type and the button was unmounted and rebuilt — about four
times a second while the CAT polls. It flickered under the pointer and swallowed
clicks, because the node being clicked no longer existed when the click landed.
The padlock now lives at module level and is passed its state.
From-radio level. It reached the QSO recorder and nothing else, so an operator
listening through OpsLog heard no difference between 10% and 150% — the control
was not weak, it was disconnected. It now scales the monitor too, applied on the
captured chunk so the network-fed path keeps its own levels, and a running
monitor picks up a change immediately: making someone restart the monitor to
hear the slider is how a working control gets reported as broken.
Callsign field widened to w-56, the room coming from the RST pair which never
needs more than five characters. It is the one field always typed into, it
carries the REC badges, and a long portable call has to stay readable.
Reported precisely: press play again and it stops the current message, but you
then have to wait the whole length of the message before it will play — otherwise
the radio is keyed and the PTT released at once.
Play only SIGNALLED the previous playback to stop and started a new one straight
away. The old goroutine still held the WASAPI render client for a moment, so the
new client could not start; it returned immediately and the PTT tail was all that
was left. The log now shows both halves of that: a play line, then a release
120 ms later.
Stopping now waits for the goroutine to have returned — the point of stopping
before starting again — bounded at 1.5 s so a wedged device cannot freeze the
operator's click, and saying so in the log if it ever comes to that.
From an operator's log, playing a recording on the air repeatedly:
18:52:40.148 play → 18:52:48.420 PTT released 8.2 s, the whole take
18:52:57.759 play → 18:52:57.879 PTT released 0.12 s, nothing came out
Those 120 ms are the PTT release tail alone: the render device refused to start
and playPCM returned an error that was thrown away. The call reported success
every time, which is what "it plays once and then never again" looks like from
the outside — and why the search went to the recorder, which was innocent.
The error is now logged with the device name.
The messages went to the radio exactly as recorded. Nothing in OpsLog could
raise them, so a microphone captured quietly drove the rig quietly and the only
remedies were the radio's own USB input menu or the Windows mixer — which is
where the operator was heading. There is now a level from 10 to 400 %, applied
with clamping (a wrap would turn loud speech into noise on the air), and Play
previews at that same level so the adjustment is made against what will actually
be transmitted.
The PTT method list also named only OmniRig, Flex, Icom and TCI, so choosing a
native Yaesu left "CAT" with no backend beside it — which reads as "there is no
CAT PTT for my radio" and sends the operator to RTS on a COM port that has
nothing to do with the rig. Same list-needing-every-member shape as three
earlier bugs in this feature. The TestPTT log line had the same rot: it said
"CAT via OmniRig" whatever backend was running.